Facts about the Global Commission on the Future of Work

In 2015, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) launched the Future of Work Initiative, a comprehensive endeavour to deepen understanding of the challenges facing the labour market of the future and equip the ILO to tackle them. The initiative’s conclusions will be presented in conjunction with the ILO’s centenary in 2019.

ILO Director-General Guy Ryder has written the following about the initiative: “In 1919, the founders of the ILO stated that they were ‘moved by sentiments of justice and humanity as well as by the desire to secure the permanent peace of the world’. In 1944, the Declaration of Philadelphia stated that ‘the war against want requires to be carried on with unrelenting vigour’. The initiative that will culminate in 2019 should give expression to those same sentiments and point the way to how that war can be carried on, with the same vigour, but also performing the tasks and applying the methods required by radically changed circumstances in the world of work.”

The Future of Work Initiative is a three-stage process. During the first stage (2016–2017), ILO Member States and other interested actors are invited to contribute input via national or regional conferences to the reflection on the future of work. The second stage involves establishing a High-level Global Commission on the Future of Work, including experts and companies, employers and trade unions, which will produce a report on the labour market of the future. In the third stage, Member States will be encouraged to mark the ILO centenary in various ways.

The Commission, which was launched on 21 August 2017, will work until early 2019 to produce its report, which will be presented at the centenary session of the International Labour Conference in June 2019.

The work of the Commission will be organised around four ‘centenary conversations’, as ILO Director-General Guy Ryder has called them, which are the foundation of the Future of Work Initiative: 1. Work and society 2. Decent jobs for all 3. The organisation of work and production 4. The governance of work

Members

The ILO Governing Body agreed earlier this year on the following criteria for the Commission’s composition: “Its members will be eminent individuals with outstanding personal achievements and vision, participating in their individual capacity. They will need to represent a balance of geographical regions and the realities of developing, emerging and industrialised countries. Gender balance will be a basic consideration. The ILO’s tripartite constituency should find their interests represented in the Commission which should also bring together multidisciplinary perspectives and knowledge to ensure that the exercise is well rounded and relevant to the entirety of the ILO’s constituency and mandate.”